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I was on a vSphere upgrade review engagement recently, and part of this involved checking hardware and existing vSphere VI was compatible with the targeted upgrade.

To help myself along, I created a few PowerCLI scripts to help with information gathering to CSV for the VI parts – such as Host Versions, build numbers, VMware tools and hardware versions, etc… These scripts were built to run once-off, simply either by copy/pasting them into your PowerCLI console, or by running them from the PowerCLI console directly.

They can easily be adapted to collect other information relating to VMs or hosts. To run, just launch PowerCLI, connect to the VC in question (using Connect-VIServer) and then copy/paste these into the console. The output will be saved to CSV in the directory you were in. Just make sure you unblock the zip file once downloaded if you execute them directly from PowerCLI, otherwise the copy/paste option mentioned above will work fine too.

There are three scripts bundled in the zip file:

Gather all hosts under the connected vCenter server and output Host name, Model and Bios version results to PowerCLI window and CSV

Gather all hosts under the connected vCenter server and output Host name, Version and Build version results to PowerCLI window and CSV

Gather all hosts under the specified DC and output VM name and hardware version results to PowerCLI window and CSV

Short and simple scripts, but hopefully they will come in handy to some. As mentioned above, these can easily be extended to fetch other information about items in your environment. Just take a look at the way existing info is fetched, and adapt from there. Also remember that using | gm (get-member) on objects in PowerShell is your friend – you can discover all the properties and methods on PowerShell objects by using this, and use those to enhance your reports/outputs in your scripts.

Quite some time ago I created a PowerCLI function to help me determine VMware Tools versions of queried VMs using PowerCLI. The tools version is returned as a 4 digit number by the vSphere API, and subsequently, so does PowerCLI. This makes determining VMware Tools versions at a glance, a bit of a hassle.

The original function was able to output Tools versions up to ESXi 4.1 u1 or u2, and this week was the first time I had a good use case for this script. I needed more up to date mappings, so I have updated the function to work with VMware tools versions all the way up to ESXi 5.5 now.